Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest - Softcover

Huber, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501127705 ISBN 13: 9781501127700

Publisher: Free Press, 2015

Synopsis

Mark Zuckerberg's 'A Year of Books' Selection

George Orwell's bleak visions of the future, one in which citizens are monitored through telescreens by an insidious Big Brother, has haunted our imagination long after the publication of 1984. Orwell's dystopian image of the telescreen as a repressive instrument of state power has profoundly affected our view of technology, posing a stark confrontational question: Who will be master, human or machine? Experience has shown, however, that Orwell's vision of the future was profoundly and significantly wrong: The conjunction of the new communications technologies has not produced a master-slave relation between person and computer, but rather exciting possibilities for partnership.

In an extraordinary demonstration of the emerging supermedium's potential to engender new forms of creativity, Huber's book boldly reimagines 1984 from the computer's point of view. After first scanning all of Orwell's writings into his personal computer, Huber used the machine to rewrite the book completely, for the most part using Orwell's own language. Alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, Huber advances Orwell's plot to a surprising new conclusion while seamlessly interpolating his own explanations and arguments. The result is a fascinating utopian work which envisions a world at our fingertips of ever-increasing information, equal opportunity, and freedom of choice.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Huber, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is the author of Galileo's Revenge. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Law School and was a clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court.

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1501127705
• ISBN 13: 9781501127700
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384